2004–2012
Photographs from the series Ladies and Gentelman can be arranged in sets, notwithstanding the geography of origin. Hairdresser displays from Gdańsk, Tczew and Kielce are not much different from those photographed by the artists in the streets of Luxembourg, Brussels, Amsterdam or Tel Aviv. Almost all of them feature the motif of an elaborately dressed hair. Simplified silhouettes, en face or in profile, show the whole palette of styles of pop culture, from retro to new age. Cliches swarming in the mass imagination, educadet on comic strips, film stills, and record covers, also make references to Warhol’s processed and duplicated ” celebrity heads”. Sometimes, we can recognize the faces known from the screen ora a stage in these hairdresses-service images. After all, it is not the hairstyle but style itself which is the point, pertaining to more than the adertised service itself. It is the style which would make the potential client feel they had expressed themselves, choosing her- or himsefl in terms of the figure in the advertisement. Modest coiffeurs’ window displays offerus a spectacle, be it on a smaller scale and often using slightly demode aesthetic forms; nevertheless, we deal with the continuous sampling of signs of identity within them, which in turn plays on the consumerist desire for designer – tailored narcissism or “the new type of narcissism”, satiated with its own image.
